Photo by Miss Charlotte Lloyd.
LOMBARDS’ ROW.
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The Lawrence monuments are interesting. Thomas Lawrence, the banker and goldsmith of Lombards’ Row, appears with all his Elizabethan family about him. His epitaph is often quoted:
Thus Thomas Lawrence spekes to Tymes ensuing:
That Death is sure, and Tyme is past renuing!
He was the father of Mrs. Sara Colvile, whose rising figure blocks a beautifully carved window—worth seeing from the vestry side—and of Sir John Lawrence, whose epitaph begins with the trenchant lines:
When bad men dy, and turn to their last Sleepe,
What Stir, the Poets and Ingravers keepe!
The Italian triumphal arch, for which the chancel arch was cut, and the symmetry of the church for ever dislocated, is to the memory of one Richard Gervaise, 1563, son of a mercer and sheriff of London, who may have been a business partner or relative of the Lawrences; the brasses of Sir Henry and Lady Christina Waver, 1460, have been stolen from the pavement, where many other Lawrence names are recorded.
The Lawrence Chapel subsequently became the property of the Rawlings family, whose crest appears on several of the pew doors, and in 1894 the Rev. R. H. Davies succeeded in securing it for the church.